I bought and read this book in preparation for moving from San Diego to Norfolk...I wanted to get a flavor of the area. What a pleasant surprise! A fascinating read and one that will make you want to visit the area to see where ESB lived, and where she had such influence in preserving historical Richmond.

Knowing a bona fide eccentric, especially a benevolent one, is simultaneously an entertaining and exasperating experience. Sharing that experience with others is usually daunting. Either the essence of the person being described becomes lost in a jumble of amusing but disjointed anecdotes or eccentricity overwhelms the eccentric, rendering a flat, one-dimensional cartoon in place of a complex, multi-faceted portrait.

In Never Ask Permission, Mary Buford Hitz tackles this daunting task head on, the subject of this memoir being her mother, Elizabeth Scott Bocock or, as she often signed herself, ESB. Rather than take a sequential, "I-am-born" approach, the author chooses to devote separate chapters to different aspects of her mother's personality, each chapter a self-contained essay, overflowing with anecdotes, quotes, and, perhaps most illuminating of all, snippets of ESB's autobiographical sketches. (Most of these autobiographical excerpts, by the way, come from essays ESB wrote during her college years, which began after her sixty-seventh birthday.) Just as a puzzle becomes a picture as each piece falls into place, so does ESB's complex character come into focus, chapter by chapter, with a poignant, but essential clue to this charming, but undeniably complex Virginian saved until the very end.

Many CEO's could learn from ESB's capacity to set goals and achieve them. As ESB emerges from the pages of this lovingly crafted book, the reader meets a determined and creative thinker who probably would not have been impressed with "left-brain/right-brain, lateral thinking, creative problem-solving, if you aren't part of the solution, you're part of the problem" lingo, but who embodied the positive persona such jargon seeks to describe. With one foot firmly planted in late Victorian America and the other constantly, restlessly forcing her into the future, she was a visionary with an astonishing ability to get things done.

If you enjoy biography, if you are fascinated by Virginia, if you want some side-splitting laughs, or if you are just interested in a good read, this is the book for you.

If the moral of Never ask permission lies in the title, I will jump to the front of the line to praise it. The narrative careens around corners and bounces over bumps so merrily that the reader has only fleeting moments to enjoy the insiights and hoot at the comedy while holding on tightly to that pale yellow tailgate.